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AbstractWhat would it mean to take zombies seriously? Cultural savants have noted the rise of the zombie in American popular culture in the twenty‐first century. And many scholars have found the zombie useful as a lumbering, empty‐headed metaphor that could signify just about anything. The zombie might look like a loved ovne, but their flesh is rotting and their individualism has tragically withered away. Before I came to zombology, I was already fascinated by an American obsession with preventing the decay of the corpse through an exceptional devotion to embalming. I argue that the intersection of the new zombie‐ism, the rapid decline of embalming, and the mass trauma of 9/11 is significant. Playing with zombies along a spectrum from fright to humor allows Americans to work through not a crisis of meaning, but a crisis of being. The cult of individualism no longer needs a perfect biological body.

RésuméCet article étudie les flux économiques et sociaux à la Nouvelle-Orléans auxviiiesiècle. Il a pour objectif de démontrer que les thèses de Braudel sur l'influence des courants maritimes et la force d'attraction du capitalisme peuvent être étendues à la « Méditerranée du Nouveau monde» qu'était la région comprise entre le Mississippi et les Caraïbes. Les Amérindiens voyageaient et commerçaient dans la région depuis fort longtemps, ce qui a influencé le choix du site de La Nouvelle-Orléans, tandis que la navigation était rendue possible par les marins et constructeurs de bateaux d'origine africaine. Cependant, l'économie maritime de La Nouvelle-Orléans ne peut être uniquement expliquée par le jeu du capitalisme classique. La contrebande et le capital social ont joué un rôle extrêmement important dans la formation de la ville. La Nouvelle-Orléans n'était qu'un des nombreux mondes clandestins qui s'épanouissaient à l'époque en marge des voies commerciales officielles.

Using observations from recent participation in post‐Katrina recovery efforts in New Orleans, I make the case in this article that taphonomic processes such as trash removal, deposition, earthmoving, and demolition are a primary medium through which individuals and communities reconstitute themselves following a disaster. Taphonomy, or the formation of the archaeological record, does not simply reflect social processes, it is a social process. The taphonomic processes currently underway through the clean‐up and rebuilding efforts in New Orleans dramatically illustrate this point. I recommend that both ethnographers and archaeologists undertake a fine‐grained ethnoarchaeology of disaster. I engage with the literature of disaster to illustrate the potentials I see for this type of study, particularly as it pertains to the culture–nature nexus, perceptions of vulnerability, and the revelatory power of disasters.

Describes how Cuba developed a countrywide system of food meaning and production in the mid-19th c. that became a national, and eventually "nationalist", cuisine during Cuba's revolutionary moments. Author explains how the centrality of food within Cuban national identity was strongly related with the valency associated with the subsistence farming on small family farms ("sitios"), producing these native foods and Caribbean ingredients, e.g. cassava, guava, and sweet potatoes. The self-sufficiency of these small farmers was in emerging nationalist discourses opposed to the large-scale, export-oriented, colonial plantations and to slavery. Many small family farmers, of which many were ex-slaves, participated in the armed struggles in part to defend their right of independent, subsistence agriculture. Author outlines how since the early, mid-19th-c. Creole nationalism, Creole food and the small farms remained associated with authentic Cuban folk culture and with national identity, and related to independence struggles, and self-sufficiency, including during and after the 1959 Revolution.

In the past 25 years, an interest in "informal economies" has grown across the social sciences, encompassing economic activities not (successfully) regulated by government. Archaeology has paralleled this interest primarily through studies of household and craft production; much of this work presumes rather than proves state control over quotidian exchanges. The smaller number of works on the riskier endeavors of piracy, smuggling, and prostitution, which we review here, underscores how weak the formal/informal duality is in application over the longue durée: Most markets are gray, not black or white. Instead of discussing the problematic category of the informal economy, we focus on illegal and illicit economies while demonstrating that the relationship between government and economy is highly variable, politically volatile, and socially embedded. We identify emerging trends in archaeology and address the hesitation to read archaeological deposits for clandestine activities by eliciting the distinct forensic patterns they leave in the material record.

The current appetite in popular culture for the "pirates of the Caribbean" is paralleled by what appears to be a worldwide outbreak of intellectual piracy. What, if anything, links the classic Caribbean pirate to these latter-day phenomena? We argue that compelling parallels exist between the early modern conditions that produced Blackbeard and today's world of virtual monopolies. Out of this comparison, we attempt an anthropological definition of piracy. Pirate cultures are organizations of social bandits , in the Hobsbawmian sense, who appear on the scene as folk heroes when contradictions and inequalities built into a political economy peak to the breaking point.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- anupama rao and steven pierce Discipline and the Other Body: Humanitarianism, Violence, and the Colonial Exception -- Defining and Defiling the Criminal Body at the Cape of Good Hope: Punishing the Crime of Suicide under Dutch East India Company Rule, circa 1652-1795 -- The Burden of Louis Congo and the Evolution of Savagery in Colonial Louisiana -- ''Sinful Propensities'': Piracy, Sodomy, and Empire in the Rhetoric of Naval Reform, 1770-1870 -- The Raj's Other Great Game: Policing the Sexual Frontiers of the Indian Army in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century -- Problems of Violence, States of Terror: Torture in Colonial India -- Punishment and the Political Body: Flogging and Colonialism in Northern Nigeria -- Footbinding and Anti-footbinding in China: The Subject of Pain in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries -- An Economy of Su√ering: Addressing the Violence of Discipline in Railway Workers' Petitions to the Agent of the East Indian Railway, 1930-47 -- Spirit Discipline: Gender, Islam, and Hierarchies of Treatment in Postcolonial Northern Nigeria -- Selections from Castaway -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index